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Wednesday, February 20, 2008

We had a vistor on our glass door one night, hunting for moths attracted to the porch light.

He decided to find a less conspicuous place to sit when we came out, but the brickwork isn't the best camouflage for a green tree frog. It amazes me how they can walk up vertical surfaces though.

We get two types of frogs around here frequently: Green tree frogs and Burrowing frogs, which we continually dig-up in the garden. You can get quite a fright when the soil suddenly jumps off your shovel!!

We always knew we'd use the few metres of land between the first wall and our boundary fence, but weren't exactly sure how. So with nearly a whole pallet of blocks left, we set to work on another smaller wall.

Here is where work begins. We managed to manouvre around a native grass to preserve it.Directly in front is the first wall we constructed several weeks ago, and right beside the grass is the beginnings of the trench for wall number two. I thought I would highlight the naitve grass as a navigation point in the pictures to come.

Here is where the first course goes down on the compacted roadbase, and backfilled with blue metal. Although we went through a lot of blue metal to fill the hollow blocks, drainage is improved immensely. See the clump of native grass?

This is the new wall in comparison to the old one. If you can see the 3 wooden stakes in the ground, that is where the wall is destined to follow. We never meant to plan such a sweeping effect, but it's given us a wonderful opportunity to impliment some stairs.

And this is looking between the two walls, where the stairs will be. We have some blocks already set out to mark where they will go, but we've decided on a different colour for the steps. Those bricks will be for wall number 3, which is on the cut side of both these walls. We already have two pallets waiting to be laid

And finally, the finished wall! We went an extra course higher on this one because it was on a lower piece of ground. It all does the job though. We were surpised how fast this particular wall went up. Not surprising considering it was about half the size of the first one.

What you're looking at in the last photo however, is going to be the final resting place of the garden shed. Finally! One more wall to go up before the slab can be laid though.

Can you still see the native grass? We're very happy it survived the construction process. That's what you can do when you're doing it by hand.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

The last remaining tyre from our wall project became our daughter's - but she's more than happy to share it with her Panda cat.

What must go through a cat's head after seeing something they simply have to sit in! Empty cardboard boxes are generally his favourite, but this object obviously had to get the Panda booty treatment too. He likes it!